To help us build Naftiko, we conducted market research across 10+ segments to inform our product direction. We wanted to cut through market noise and identify the signals most important to enterprise organizations today. We started by targeting 15 companies across 15 business sectors—a number we've since doubled twice—to understand how we could gather the most meaningful signals about corporate investment priorities. This has evolved into an ongoing program called Naftiko Signals, where we work to understand where enterprises are in their digital transformation and what Naftiko can build to support that journey.
25+ Different Signals Gathered
As part of Naftiko Signals, we gather data across over 25 areas to understand enterprise investment patterns. We collect external signals from blog posts, press releases, job postings, public GitHub repositories, and more. We then evaluate these signals using over 25 criteria, ranging from API and AI investment to SaaS portfolio and mergers and acquisitions. Naftiko aims to understand where enterprises are investing and which services and tools they're using, so we can build capabilities around these priorities. Our customers can then run these capabilities using the Naftiko Framework and Engine, connecting through the Naftiko Fabric.
Signals Across 60+ Companies
We started Naftiko Signals with 15 companies across different industries, focusing on high-profile mainstream organizations. Once we defined our process, we doubled that number by adding a competitor for each company we were profiling. Our initial intent was to plant seeds for our eventual sales motion, but after gathering the signals, we realized there was a wealth of information for our roadmap and material that could drive deeper customer conversations. We've recently doubled the number of companies again to over 60 and will continue adding more each week. Our goal is to expand within each industry while also moving into new industries we hadn't initially considered, producing a rich and diverse set of signals to inform the Naftiko product roadmap.
25+ Services Profiled So Far
One important signal we've tuned into is the services companies use. Service names appear in blog posts, press releases, and job postings. We've aggregated all the services we found across companies and have begun profiling over 25 of them. We document the business and technical details of each service, ensuring we have certified OpenAPIs for their APIs. These are the services we've begun prototyping capabilities around to support enterprise investments. We've prioritized the top services encountered in our market research, signal gathering, and ongoing design partner conversations. While we've identified thousands of services, we plan to cover the top 250 in the next couple of months, prioritizing based on design partner and initial customer feedback. Please let us know which services you'd like to see prioritized.
Top Open-Source Projects Used
Beyond commercial services, we want to understand the open-source standards and tooling enterprises use. We're specifically interested in Apache, Linux, and CNCF projects. We investigate which standards and tools are in use and how they align with commercial services—identifying which services enable and support these open-source standards and tools. This helps us see the overlap between commercial services and open-source solutions, and more importantly, how enterprises stitch together their platforms. We're not just looking for open-source signals; we're also tracking inner-source signals. Understanding enterprise usage of and contribution to open-source is important, but not all companies have that in their DNA. Inner-source signals also reveal a lot about where enterprises are in their journey.
Top Areas of Investment
Another critical set of signals includes top investment areas across these companies. These investments include APIs (through gateway investments), establishing centers of excellence, and building platform teams. Other investments inevitably involve artificial intelligence, but we're examining how API, platform, standards, and other investments enable or constrain AI adoption. The priorities of enterprises we're profiling through Naftiko Signals shape the Naftiko product roadmap—not just the services we make available for developing and delivering Naftiko capabilities that power integrations, but also the technical details of which standards they're investing in and the business details of how they're applying FinOps, cloud, and SaaS management. Understanding these top areas informs the open-source features we'll deliver this year and the commercial fabric we're setting in motion for 2027.
Capabilities and Intent
All of this work enables us to define the business capabilities Naftiko customers will need. The investments, services, and open-source tooling used by enterprises tell us much, but we're working hard to understand the intent behind these investments. This is what the Naftiko Signals program is about right now. It's a scratch pad for us to publish the signals we've gathered across companies, share their investments, and start conversations. Our goal is to enable the creation of meaningful capabilities that can be executed using the Naftiko framework and engine, while also distilling the complex landscape of concepts, services, tools, and other elements into something that reflects the intent behind why AI, API, and integration leadership are making these investments. While we think some companies and people will be very interested in the data we're publishing, we anticipate that most won't have the time or bandwidth to dive deep. We'll need to align the stories we tell and the conversations we have with the intent behind each company's strategic and tactical decisions.
Feel free to play around with the data and tooling we've published, but remember it is just a scratchpad that is updated daily. If you have any questions about Naftiko Signals feel free to email kinlane@naftiko.io directly, and we'd happy to answer any questions.
URL: https://naftiko.github.io/signals/
